All's Fair in Love and War
by nickelback2001
Summary: Damon Salvatore is in an arranged marriage with Caroline Forbes. Because he regrets getting married to her, he enlists himself as a Confederate soldier to avoid her and their marriage. However, after being injured in battle, he meets and falls in love with a nurse named Elena. How will Damon deal with his marriage to Caroline?
1. An Unhappy Arrangement

Damon hates his father.

Damon belongs to one of the founding families of the town that he lives in, Mystic Falls, Virginia. Because of this, his father, Giuseppe Salvatore, believes that Damon should marry a member of another founding family just like he did. Since his birth, it has been arranged for Damon to marry Caroline Forbes, but he has little interest in her. Sure she's beautiful with golden blonde hair and bright blue eyes, but he shares no chemistry with her in the slightest. All of his life, he has dreamed about marrying someone with a passion for life, someone who he could argue all day with, but he could never stay mad at, someone who he completely and utterly in love with. But no, he was stuck with Caroline Forbes for the rest of his life, the girl who acts prim and proper all day, the girl who feels the need to control everything in her life and other's, the girl he doesn't love even the littlest bit. His arranged marriage to Caroline was just one of the many reasons that Damon Salvatore hated his father. He abused him and his younger brother, Stefan, their entire lives, he sent his mother away when she was dying of consumption, and now he took away the choice of who he gets to spend the rest of his life with. And for that, Damon will never forgive his father.

* * *

It's his wedding day, yet Damon has never felt more miserable in his life.

They're having a huge and lavish wedding, nothing less would have been acceptable for Caroline Forbes. The scenery is perfect: it's a nice sunny day, there are arrangements of red roses everywhere, and everyone is wearing their Sunday best. The entire town of Mystic Falls is in attendance since it's a marriage between two founding family members. Today should have been one of the happiest days of his life, but Damon feels like he is signing his own death certificate.

He is now standing at the end of the aisle with his brother and the pastor by his side. Just like Damon, Stefan looks depressed, he always had a thing for Caroline. The pianist and small orchestra starts playing and everyone stands up from their seats. As Caroline starts to walk down the aisle with her father on her arm, the rest of his life starts to flash behind Damon's eyes. At first it would seem like they had the perfect marriage: they would have two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, and they would both have blue eyes like their parents, they would run the family plantation together and would be immensely wealthy, and they would travel the world and tell everyone about their adventures. But behind closed doors, they would grow to hate each other: Caroline would just sit around with the other married women and sew and gossip all day, he would drown his sorrows in bourbon, and they would have boring sex a few times a year because they felt obligated to since they were married. And his vision flashed forward to when he was on his deathbed and all he could think about was how much he regretted marrying Caroline Forbes.

By now, Caroline is reaching him and Damon ignores his daydream. Backing out of the wedding would be a huge dishonor to both his and Caroline's families. The pastor starts the ceremony and Damon drowns him out, it turns out that he can't shake his vision of his future. The pastor now says something to him and he takes that as his cue to start mumbling his vows. Caroline then repeats hers and they are now pronounced as Mr. and Mrs. Damon Salvatore. The pastor now tells him that he can now kiss his bride, and Damon hesitates before giving Caroline a quick peck on her lips. There wasn't even a little spark between them.

They now go through their reception, and the entire town congratulates them on their marriage, including his father. Damon just brushes him off, like he actually cares about him. He shares a bland piece of cake with Caroline, and they go through every wedding tradition. Everyone looks like they are having a great time, everyone except him.

Suddenly it's their wedding night, and they are now expected to consummate their marriage. Damon was already not a virgin, but Caroline definitely was based off of how nervous she looked. They pulled off their clothes and he sighed as he started thrusting in and out of her. Yep, there was definitely no connection there. When he was about to finish, Damon pulled out of her, he definitely did not want a kid with her right now. After that, he fell asleep next to her with nothing but regret filling his every thought.

* * *

Damon wakes up still regretting the previous day.

Men joke with him about his wedding night, but he just brushes them off, he's not in the mood. He sits next to his father and brother at the table, and eats his breakfast in silence. They try to make conversation with him, but Damon ignores them, they aren't the ones who now have to spend the rest of their lives with someone they dislike.

He goes through the rest of his day trying to avoid Caroline: he goes riding with Stefan, he helps run the plantation, and then he goes into town with the excuse of visiting his best friend Alaric, but in reality, he goes to the town's pub to drink away his regret. He's sitting in the corner of the pub nursing an entire bottle bourbon by himself when a man rushes in and shouts about how we were now at war with the Yankees. Men start scrambling out of their seats and rush over to the town hall to enlist themselves. Damon ignores them and keeps drowning his sorrows until a thought comes into his head: if he enlisted himself into the war, he could ignore his problems with Caroline for awhile. And Suddenly, Damon is a confederate soldier being shipped off to a war he doesn't care about.


	2. A Life Full of Grief

Elena Gilbert knows grief.

At this point in her life, she has grieving down to a science. Her mother, Miranda, died while giving birth to Elena's younger brother, Jeremy, when she was five years old. Only a few months later, Jeremy died of crib death. Her father, Grayson, died of typhoid a few years later when she was only ten. After her father's death, Elena left her home in Mystic Falls to live with her Aunt Jenna in Richmond. There was a grace period between her father's death and Jenna's death that she felt happy. Elena went to an all girl's school and made friends. She learned how to play the piano and how to speak French, and she was courted by a few boys, though it was never really love. However, when her aunt and baby cousin died in childbirth when Elena was seventeen, she lost the little joy she had left in her life since the death of her parents and brother.

Elena continued to live in Richmond with her uncle, Jenna's husband, but she had no real family left anymore. She no longer went to school because she had to replace Jenna as the caretaker of the house and of her uncle, though she rarely ever saw him these days since he spent his time drinking himself away at the pub. Now Elena's life was waking up early every day in order to have time to cook three meals and have the house in pristine condition while her uncle wasted her family's savings on liquor and gambling. Some might wonder why she put up with her uncle and continued to live under his roof. Elena dealt with him because of his rather nasty temper that he had when he came home drunk, which was most nights, and she feared he would inflict his wrath upon her if the house wasn't kept as well as Jenna had it before her death. But the biggest reason that she stayed was that she had nowhere left to go. Her family was dead, and she wasn't about to marry into a new one. Elena was determined to make the situation work because if she didn't, she wasn't so sure she would even have a home anymore.

* * *

On Elena's eighteenth birthday, the news that the war had started reached Richmond. Many of the city's able-bodied men enlisted themselves that day, including her uncle, who was only in his mid-thirties. A few days later he left to go to training, and that was the last time she ever saw her uncle again.

Elena now spent her days as a seamstress in order to pay the taxes on the house and to gain back the money her uncle wasted with drinking. All of her food came from her garden that she spent every waking moment that she wasn't sewing trying to keep alive. Her dresses were all hand-me-downs from Jenna or old dresses of hers that she patched up. At this point, many would've given up and tried to marry someone with a decent income. It would've been easy for Elena to do because even though she wore patched up dresses, she was one of the most beautiful girls in the entire city with her shiny chocolate colored tresses and big brown doe eyes. However, Elena didn't want to take the easy way out. She was determined that once she did marry, it would be for love: she wanted a love that would consume her, she wanted passion and adventure, and even a little danger. She wasn't going to give these up for a stable life. And so, at this point in Elena's life, her hope was the only thing that kept her going everyday.

When Elena wasn't sewing or working in her garden, she was volunteering at the hospital in Richmond. Everyday, more and more Confederate soldiers were piled into the cramped space. Many were dying of disease, but there were also horrific injuries from recent battles against the Yankees. Those were the worst to assist the doctors with. She couldn't even the count how many times she had to try to calm men down while one of their limbs were being amputated. Even though it was disgusting work, Elena continued to help the hospital in order to do her part for the war effort.

Each time that she came to the hospital, Elena first always looked to see if her uncle was one of the many men that were dying around her, but she never saw him. After being disappointed that she didn't know the whereabouts of her last living family member, she would begin her work. Her main task was to just try to make the soldiers comfortable while they were extremely ill or on death's door. Elena would hold their hands and tell them stories of her childhood when she lived with her Aunt Jenna, like how she would mess up her French and say embarrassing things to native French speakers: anything that would take their minds off of how much pain they were in. She even got the occasional marriage proposal from them and she would laugh it off and tell them to ask her again once they felt better. And once those men that she would comfort passed, she felt grief, but she managed it the only way she knew how: to work even harder to help them.

One day, when Elena was going through her routine of comforting the wounded men, two pretty beaten up soldiers were rushing in another, but this soldier was severely injured with blood rushing out of his chest and appeared to be losing consciousness. Elena immediately left the man she was helping and assisted them in lifting him on a clean cot. Her first aid training kicked in and she applied pressure to his chest in an attempt to stop the bleeding. When a doctor replaced her hands with theirs and started to operate on the soldier, Elena squeezed his hand and truly looked at him for the first time. The man was extremely handsome even though he was dying: he had a strong jawline with sharp cheekbones and he had wavy raven hair that she had a strong urge to run her hands through. He had slightly calloused hands, but Elena liked the feeling of them against her fingertips. His body was muscular but lean at the same time with defined biceps and abdominal muscles. She wondered how it would feel to have those strong arms wrapped around her. However, she didn't see the most beautiful part of this man until after his eyes bolted open, and she finally looked into his crystal blue eyes for the first time.


End file.
